But it's okay to buy Oil from regimes that kill gay people or cobalt mined by Child slave labour?
Lets place the blame where it actually belongs: our corporations will sell our values, our kidneys and the entire planet down the river id they can. China is just one of the few countries that beat them at their own game.
What does this mean?
Now it's a bit too late to stop them. NATO/West id too preoccupied by Russia when, imo, China is the bigger threat, by far.
Here’s Joe Biden in 2011 fawning over King Xi and calling for a rising China.
I think the hopes were that China would benefit from trade and developed its own industries in a largely decentralized fashion (which happened). What didn’t follow was the assumption that this would cause them to become less authoritarian and more democratic.
Quite the gamble in the end; I don’t think those responsible over many decades realized what the consequences would be for getting this wrong. They all were championed by equally blind stock-market driven CEOs who wanted cheap labor, low/no environmental laws, no unions, a helpful and competent government, and new large markets who didn’t already have lots of stuff.
The US has gotten terrible at long term vision, while China has nothing but long term vision and long term memory.
Trump finally withdrew from the UPU in 2018 and ended the subsidies.
China got powerful by doing business with the rest of the world.
We should have never allowed them to become this powerful. Their ideology is toxic and incompatible with ours.